Summer vacation is a relic of the time when farmers needed the youngsters to help bring in the harvest, or so we’re told:
Historians, however, pooh-pooh this. Fear of summertime disease transmission, unavailability of air conditioning, and downward influence from the vacation habits of the rich, seem to have had more to do with it.Whatever its origins, the long school vacation is now a fixture in our culture. Since our teachers’ unions have armed themselves with thermonuclear weapons and captured one of our major political parties, it is likely to remain so, though if there is any rational pedagogical justification for twelve weeks’ juvenile idleness, I should very much like to hear it.
Until recently it could at least be said that summer vacation gave all kids the opportunity for some out-of-school socializing, and older kids a chance to get early work experience. Both rationales are now dead. The first was killed off by a combination of hyper-vigilant modern parenting styles and the home computer, the second by the J-1 visa, with which foreign students can work in the U.S. for up to four months. Why hire a surly, litigious American 16-year-old when, for the same price, you can get a Bulgarian, Ghanaian, or Malaysian 19-year-old keen to improve his English and innocent of trial lawyers?
And so we are stuck with the darn kids for twelve weeks. Few of them seem to have any idea what to do with themselves. Running off to play in the woods Tom Sawyer-style is out of the question: They might encounter poison ivy or Lyme disease. Hanging out in the town is discouraged: pedophiles, drugs, gangs. The district has summer programs, but they are not popular with the mid-teen set, to which my kids (ages 16 and 14) now belong, and in any case they are disappearing as budgets are cut.
What the kids want to do is play computer games. Years of striving to lead them into worthwhile hobbies have yielded only partial, tepid returns. They — boys, especially — yearn for those flickering screens. When deprived of them, they yawn and doze, unable to summon up enthusiasm for anything much else.
It’s the same all over. A friend raised in rural Ireland went back for a visit after some years. A little river runs through his home town; in summer, he tells me, he and his friends would be in it, or by it, all day and every day — swimming if the weather was warm, fishing if not. Yet on this recent visit he was surprised, on a fine summer afternoon, to see no children at all near the river. Where were they? “At home playing Doom,” he was told.